Understanding language through vision

✍ Scribed by Cristina Meini; Alfredo Paternoster

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 686 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0269-2821
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00159214

✦ Synopsis

We discuss briefly (from a philosophical point of view) why interfacing a linguistic analyzer with an artificial vision system is an important issue. In particular we claim that a linguistic analyzer supported by perception can actually understand, and not just process symbols. This is a possible objection against John Searle's well-known Chinese room argument.

Secondly we present REF-MACHINE, a verification system architecture integrating a linguistic analyzer and a vision system. The global system can establish whether a sentence is true or false in a situation given through a symbolic description of a scene or directly in a real scene (given full perception equipment, a camera, and so on). This is a recognition system, partially implemented in LISP, incorporating an algorithm to interpret some locative expressions.